Monday, November 30, 2015

In 1936, London's famed Crystal Palace, constructed for the International Exhibition of 1851, was destroyed in the most spectacular fire seen in Britain for many years. It started about 8 pm and spread with such amazing rapidity that within half an hour the great building was ablaze from end to end. Flames rose 300-ft despite the efforts of 90 engines and 500 firemen. Only the two towers escaped destruction. When built, constructed mainly of glass and iron, it was nicknamed "The Crystal Palace" by Punch magazine.

In 1854 the sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins installed three construct full-size concrete restorations of Iguanodon, Hylaeosaurus, and Megalosaurus on the grounds of Sydenham Park, home of the Crystal Palace.

Robert Broom (Nov. 30, 1866 – April 6, 1951) was a South African doctor and paleontologist. From 1903 to 1910 he was professor of zoology and geology at Victoria College, Stellenbosch, South Africa, and subsequently he became keeper of vertebrate paleontology at the South African Museum, Cape Town.

Broom was first known for his study of mammal-like reptiles. After Raymond Dart's discovery of the Taung Child, an infant australopithecine, Broom's interest in paleoanthropology was heightened. In 1934 he jojned the staff of the Transvaal Museum in Pretoria as an Assistant in Palaeontology.

In the following years, he made a series of spectacular finds, including fragments from six hominids in Sterkfontein, which he named Plesianthropus transvaalensis. In 1937, Broom made his most famous discovery of Paranthropus robustus. These discoveries helped support Dart's claims for the Taung species.

The remainder of Broom's career was devoted to the exploration of these sites and the interpretation of the many early hominid remains discovered there. In 1946 he proposed the Australopithecinae subfamily. From Princeton.edu

Saturday, November 28, 2015

Von Baer (Feb 29, 1792 - Nov 28, 1876) was a Prussian-Estonian embryologist who discovered the mammalian egg (1827) and the notochord. He established the new science of comparative embryology alongside comparative anatomy with the publication of two landmark volumes (in 1828 and 1837) covering the range of existing knowledge of the prebirth developments of vertebrates.

He showed that mammalian eggs were not the follicles of the ovary but microscopic particles inside the follicles. He described the development of the embryo from layers of tissue, which he called germ layers, and demonstrated similarities in the embryos of different species of vertebrates.

Scott (Nov. 28, 1854 – Jan. 29, 1934) was an English paleobotanist and leading authority of his time on the structure of fossil plants, one of those who laid the foundations of paleobotany. He conducted experiments in the Jodrell Laboratory in Kew Gardens, where he became its honorary keeper (1892-1906). In collaboration with W.C. Williamson, he wrote three papers on fossil-plant morphology (1894-95).

Thursday, November 26, 2015

Hedin (Feb. 19,1865 - Nov. 26, 1952) was a Swedish explorer and geographer, born in Stockholm, who led four multi-year expeditions into Central Asia between 1897 and 1935. Although not as well known as Roy Chapman Andrews his work in the regions revealed a wealth of cultural, archaeological and palaeontological wonders.

During his first major Asian expedition, he crossed the Pamirs, charted Lop Nor (Lake) in China, and finally arrived at Beijing. He then journeyed to Tibet by way of Mongolia, Siberia, and the Gobi Desert. Hedin explored Tibet and Xinjiang (Sinkiang), identified the sources of the Brahmaputra, Indus, and Sutlej rivers, and, in 1906, explored and named the Trans-Himalayas. In 1927 Hedin led an expedition of Chinese and Swedish scientists into Central Asia.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

Steve Clemente (born Esteban Clemento Morro Nov. 22, 1885—May 7, 1950) was a Mexican actor known for his many villainous roles. He began acting in his teens, signing up for his first movie, The Secret Man, in 1917. His later, numerous roles were usually bit parts and he was an expert knife thrower.

He was a known scene stealer and was famous for his villainous snarl. He later starred in such movies as The Most Dangerous Game (1932), playing Tartar, the second henchman of Count Zarrof and played the Witch King in King Kong (1933).From Wiki

Saturday, November 21, 2015

PALAEOBLOG takes a break from its usual postings to present an excerpt from Stephen R. Bissette's Behind-the-Scenes Peek at a Magnificent New Book about the Prehistory of Prehistoric Pop Culture excerpted from the upcoming MONSTER! #24, available soon from CreateSpace and amazon.com.

By Stephen R. Bissette

[The complete 10,00+ word interview and article will be published at the end of December 2015 in MONSTER! #24, available soon from CreateSpace and amazon.com; just search for “MONSTER! #24 Tim Paxton” later in December…]

The book is an astonishing overview of 19th century and early 20th century “Dinomania,” and as such essential for all MONSTER! readers. Dr. Merkl shares a wealth of information, insights, rare never-before-reprinted artwork and cartoons, and more of interest to dinosaur lovers, comics scholars, giant monster movie addicts, genre devotees, and Winsor McCay fans, including an entirely “new” (as in never-before-seen) body of work by McCay. “On p. 257-260, we have the complete text of McCay’s original GERTIE lecture, exactly as he performed it in vaudeville,” Dr. Merkl explains. “The text was thought lost, but I discovered it exactly 100 years after McCay conceived it. I think it’s important.” Absolutely.

This is Merkl’s first book published by an American publisher (Fantagraphics), at almost half the price of his now-rare Rarebit Fiend book. But—rest assured that Fantagraphics does often go with limited print runs (they have here), and they do let books drop out of print, especially books as specialized as this one.

Interview excerpt:

Stephen R Bissette: When and where did you first see evidence of the McCay ("Bob McKay") Dino comics art?
DR. ULRICH MERKL: I first saw them in Russ Cochran’s Graphic Gallery catalog no. 7 from 1976 which I obtained when I started collecting original comic art in 1984 at the age of 18. That was when I first came across Robert McCay by name, in an auction catalogue that was already nine years old. I’ve been admiring those Dino pages ever since, until they turned up again on the market in the fall of 2010 (at Russ Cochran’s again).

SRB: Do you remember your first impressions—what did you think when you initially laid eyes on those pages?

UM: At first glance they looked like pure Winsor McCay: an original idea turned into a powerful graphic by a hand with the surest touch — but strangely signed by “Bob McCay,” his son. This raised two questions:

1) If this Bob McCay was such a fantastic cartoonist, how come nobody had ever heard about it or seen his work? And

2) If the drawings were by Winsor (and I was convinced of that from the outset)—why would he sign his own work with his son’s name?

As these two Dino half-pages were practically the only thing by “Bob McCay” anyone had ever seen, experts and collectors soon reached a summary verdict: “Robert must obviously have imitated his father’s style so precisely that we cannot tell the one from the other.” Given the lack of in-depth research, this has been the state of play for decades.

SRB: Those images have bothered me since I first saw them reprinted in a British instructional cartooning book. The lack of context—they seemed to exist in a void—was troubling and compelling, all at the same time.

UM: Personally, I find it astonishing that even McCay specialists saw no problem in ascribing, without compunction, such perfectly crafted comic strips to a completely unresearched artist who appeared out of the blue, all because of a signature. What ever happened to critical style analysis? Could it really be that these masterpieces, which so resemble the work of Winsor McCay, were actually drawn by “Bob McCay,” as the author’s mark claimed?

Over the years I would peer at those pictures over and over again, but I didn’t do anything about it. With the benefit of hindsight, that was a good thing, because I would not have found anything significant anyway. For one thing, I knew too little about Winsor McCay back then, and for another, back in the pre-Internet Stone Age I would not have tracked down most of the relevant information and visual material anyway.

Fast forward 25 years. In the fall of 2010 the two Dino half-pages were back on the market, resold by the same collector who bought them in 1976 and then looked after them for 34 years. This time I had the bit between my teeth. Surely this was a promising clue. You can’t file art of that quality in a drawer with a label that says “not sure”. Why would a Dino comic languish in obscurity? And what was all this about Bob McCay, or rather his mark? I had an essay in mind, ten pages or maybe twenty.

SRB: And then it grew and grew—I know how that is!

UM: Once you start getting serious about a thing, once you start digging down, and not copying what you find on the Internet but going to the sources, things take on a life of their own. The ten pages turned into fifty, I kept discovering more material, then it was 100 pages. Every answer I found raised three new questions. The ripples kept spreading wider, more and more amazing pictures emerged from the dust of history, and sooner or later I had 200 pages. What began simply as a Dino comic strip has led me to the huge phenomenon of dinomania, and after four years I found myself holding a supersized, 296-page monster book with 670 illustrations. It turned out that the two Dino half-pages signed “Bob McCay” were fragments from Winsor McCay’s last grand project, a newspaper strip in Sunday-page format about the odyssey of a dinosaur who awakes from a long, deep sleep and starts getting into trouble with human civilization. Drawn in summer 1934 on the crest of that first great wave of dinomania that quietly took shape in 1854 and had ridden a storm of popularity since 1905. When McCay had finished five or six pages of his strip, he died quite suddenly in July 1934, and the material never endured into a published strip.

SRB: At what point did the scope of this project open up to include your detective work on the whole of prehistoric-themed comic art, and how and when did that collecting/archiving portion of the venture begin in earnest?

UM: It soon became clear that the Dino pages were fragments from something bigger, and that the strip was part of a wave of general Dinomania in which Winsor McCay had played a key role. For one year, I was gathering everything I found about Dinomania, giant-monster monster movies, and related topics: comic strips, newspaper articles, editorial cartoons, children’s magazines, and so on. I started with absolutely zero in December 2010, and in the fall of 2011, I had what is probably the world’s second largest collection of vintage dinosaur images (the largest should be yours, I guess).

Look for “MONSTER! #24 in Decmeber; just search "Monster! Tim Paxton” at Amazon.com

Friday, November 20, 2015

Researchers have unearthed an ancient fossil forest with preserved tree stumps dating to 380 million years ago preserved in Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.

The forests grew near the equator during the late Devonian period, and could provide an insight into the cause of a 15-fold reduction in levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere around that time, thought to be largely caused by a change in vegetation from diminutive plants to the first large forest trees.

The team found that the forests in Svalbard were formed mainly of lycopod trees, better known for growing millions of years later in coal swamps that eventually turned into coal deposits – such as those in South Wales. They also found that the forests were extremely dense, with very small gaps – around 20cm – between each of the trees, which probably reached about 4m high.

Armstrong (Nov. 20, 1890 – April 20, 1973) took Fay Wray to Skull Island in 1933. He returned later the same year to find The Son of Kong, only to lose him as the island sank, as these things are prone to doing.

Probrachylophosaurus bergei is a previously missing link between a preceding species, Acristavus, which lived about 81 million years ago, and later form Brachylophosaurus, which lived about 77.5 million years ago. PR

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

The The Ghost of Slumber Mountain premiered this day in 1918. It was written and directed by special effects pioneer Willis O'Brien and produced by Herbert M. Dawley. When O’Brien went on to greater fame with The Lost World Dawley sued the film makers for patent infrigment, claiming that he, not O’Brien, had invented stop-motion animation. Although this was not the case, filming saw head up while the case was sorted out.

Both O’Brien and Hawley star as the ghost of Mad Dick and Uncle Jack Holmes, respectively.

Monday, November 16, 2015

On an expedition in Scotland, researchers recently discovered the fossilized remains of a mouse-sized mammal dating back around 170 million years to the Middle Jurassic. The fossil represents a lower jaw belonging to a species of 'stem therian' mammal called Palaeoxonodon that was previously known solely from isolated teeth.

Palaeoxonodon is an important species for understanding the evolution of molar teeth in modern mammals.

The latest discovery indicates that three species previously described on the basis of individual fossilized teeth actually belong to just one species.

"This new fossil provides a wealth of novel information about an important species of early 'pre-tribosphenic mammal," said Dr. Roger Close, lead author of the Palaeontology study. PR

New research suggest that the Hangenberg extinction event 359 million years ago event that wiped out 97 percent of vertebrate species. Before the event, large creatures were the norm, but, for at least 40 million years following the die-off, the oceans were dominated by markedly smaller fish.

"Some large species hung on, but most eventually died out," Sallan said. "So the end result is an ocean in which most sharks are less than a meter and most fishes and tetrapods are less than 10 centimeters, which is extremely tiny.

"Rather than having this thriving ecosystem of large things, you may have one gigantic relict, but otherwise everything is the size of a sardine," said Sallan, an assistant professor at U Penn. Read more at: Phys Org

Walt Disney’s epic film, Fantasia, opened this day on Broadway in New York City in 1940. The film featured Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra performing a number of pieces of classical music to the film’s animated visuals. Igor Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” provided the score for the evolution of the Earth including a wonderful sequence on the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous. Many school teachers actually showed this sequence in science class up through the 1970's as it was one of the most accurate animated depictions to that date.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Mantell (Feb. 3, 1790 – Nov. 10, 1852), a physician of Lewes in Sussex in southern England, had for years been collecting fossils in the sandstone of Tilgate forest, and he had discovered bones belonging to three extinct species: a giant crocodile, a plesiosaur, and Buckland's Megalosaurus. But in 1822 he found several teeth that "possessed characters so remarkable" that they had to have come from a fourth and distinct species of Saurian. After consulting numerous experts, Mantell finally recognized that the teeth bore an uncanny resemblance to the teeth of the living iguana, except that they were twenty times larger.
In this paper, the second published description of a dinosaur, he concluded that he had found the teeth of a giant lizard, which he named Iguanodon, or "Iguana-tooth."

Mantell illustrated his announcement with a single lithographed plate. Mantell included at the bottom of the plate a drawing of a recent iguana jaw, which is shown four times natural size, and for further comparison, he added views of the inner and outer surface of a single iguana tooth, "greatly magnified."

The traditional story that Mantell's wife found the first teeth in 1822, while the doctor was visiting a patient, appears, alas, to be unfounded.

Special effects wizard best known to the world as the man who
created King Kong. O'Brien was a sculptor and cartoonist for the San Francisco "Daily News" before he first dabbled in the medium of film during the 'teens. His work caught the attention of the Edison company, for whom he produced several short subjects with a prehistoric them. Titles include The Dinosaur and the Missing Link, RFD 10,000 B.C and Prehistoric Poultry. His method of animating small rubber figures, carefully molded over metal skeletons with movable joints, by moving them a fraction of an inch for each frame of film exposed, became the standard process of live-action animation.

In 1918 he made his most ambitious film yet, The Ghost of Slumber Mountain paving the way for The Lost World (1925), a major Hollywood feature which told of a search for prehistoric creatures. O'Brien's dinosaurs were his most realistic yet, and still impress today, even in the wake of Jurassic Park Still, Obie (as he was known) kept experimenting.

When producer Merian C. Cooper saw his work, he hired O'Brien to animate King Kong (which, up to that point, was to have been shot with an actor in a gorilla suit). The extraordinary success of King Kong (1933) spawned an immediate sequel, The Son of Kong (also 1933), and made O'Brien a hero to several generations of fantasy filmmakers to come. O'Brien won his only Oscar for his effects in Mighty Joe Young (1949), another giant-monkey movie, on which his protégé (and successor) Ray Harryhausen worked.

O'Brien worked on other giant-monster movies (including 1957's The Black Scorpion his last) before dying in 1962. Today, O'Brien would be kingpin of his own studio, but even in the wake of King Kong he had trouble launching other film projects, and many promising ideas languished on studio drawing boards for decades to follow. One of the RKO staff with whom he'd worked in the 1930s, Linwood Dunn, gave O'Brien his final employment, doing stop-motion figures for It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963).

In 1950 O'Brien received (finally!) a special Oscar for his work on Mighty Joe Young which was the first such award ever given for special effects. This film also launched the career of the next great stop-motion animator, Ray Harryhausen.

Saturday, November 07, 2015

Wallace (Jan. 8, 1823 – Nov. 7, 1913) was a British naturalist and biogeographer. He was the first westerner to describe some of the most interesting natural habitats in the tropics. He is best known for devising a theory of the origin of species through natural selection made independently of Darwin.

Between 1854 and 1862, Wallace assembled evidence of natural selection in the Malay Archipelago, sending his conclusions to Darwin in England. Their findings were jointly presented to the Linnaean Society in 1858. Wallace found that Australian species were more primitive, in evolutionary terms, than those of Asia, and that this reflected the stage at which the two continents had become separated. He proposed an imaginary line (now known as Wallace's line) dividing the fauna of the two regions.From Today In Science History:

Friday, November 06, 2015

Osborn graduated (August 8, 1857 - November 6, 1935) from Princeton in 1877 and pursued his interest in the biological sciences and paleontology through additional study at several New York City medical schools and with Thomas Henry Huxley in Britain. Returning to the United States, Osborn accepted a position at Princeton, teaching natural sciences from 1881 until 1891, when he moved to Columbia University to organize the Biology Department there, and in 1891, he also helped to organize the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History acting as it’s first curator. Osborn's close association with American Museum continued for over 45 years, and included a long tenure as its President, 1908-1933. During these years the museum's collections expanded enormously and it became one of the preeminent research institutions for natural history in the world.

Osborn is noted for describing and naming both Tyrannosaurus rex and Albertosaurus in 1905, Pentaceratops in 1923, and Velociraptor in 1924. One of Osborn's favorite groups for study was the brontotheres, and he was the first to carry out comprehensive research on them. He also wrote an influential textbook, The Age of Mammals (1910).

Apart from his own research, Osborn is perhaps best remembered for the sponsorship of the five immensely successful Central Asiatic Expeditions during the 1920's and 30's led by Roy Chapman Andrews.

Thursday, November 05, 2015

”Romer (Dec. 28, 1894 – Nov. 5, 1973) was director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University until his retirement in 1961 and was one the singularly most influential vertebrate paleontologists of the 20th Century. His work ranged over virtually every conceivable subject within that field, although it was the osteology and taxonomy of the therapsids and other proto-mammals which was nearest his heart.

In addition to this work, Romer was acutely interested in the origin and initial adaptive radiation of tetrapods, and his work became the basis for a theory of tetrapod origins which was canon until the description of Acanthostega gunnari by Clack & Coates in the 1990s. Romer was ahead of his time in his defense of monophyly of Dinosauria though he did feel that Theropoda was not ancestral to birds.” link from EvoWiki.org

Hennig (April 20, 1913 – Nov. 5, 1976) is best known for developing phylogenetic systematics, a coherent theory of the investigation and presentation of the relations that exist among species. Contrary to the position generally held during his time, Hennig viewed historical inference as a strictly logical and scientific endeavor. He first summarized his ideas in 1950 in German which became more widely known with the publication of the English revision, Phylogenetic Systematics (Hennig, 1966).

1. Relationships among species are to be interpreted strictly genealogically, as sister-lineages, as clade relations. Empirically, a phylogenetic hypothesis may be determined.
2. Synapomorphies provide the only evidence for identifying relative recency of common ancestry. Synapomorphies are understood to be the shared-derived (evolved, modified) features of organisms.

3. Maximum conformity to evidence is sought (his auxiliary principle). Choice among competing cladistic propositions (cladograms) is decided on the basis of the greatest amount of evidence, the largest number of synapomorphies explainable as homologues.

4. Whenever possible, taxonomy must be logically consistent with the inferred pattern of historical relationships. The rule of monophyly is to be followed, thereby each clade can have its unique place in the hierarchy of taxonomic names.

Haldane (Nov. 5, 1892 - Dec. 1, 1964) is best remembered along with E. B. Ford and R. A. Fisher one of the three major figures to develop the mathematical theory of population genetics. His greatest contribution was in a series of ten papers on "A Mathematical Theory of Natural and Artificial Selection" which was the major series of papers on the mathematical theory of natural selection. It treated many major cases for the first time, showing the direction and rates of changes of gene frequencies. It also pioneered in investigating the interaction of natural selection with mutation and with migration.

Haldane's book, The Causes of Evolution (1932), summarized these results, especially in its extensive appendix. This body of work was a component of what came to be known as the "modern evolutionary synthesis", re-establishing natural selection as the premier mechanism of evolution by explaining it in terms of the mathematical consequences of Mendelian genetics. From Wikipedia. More info here.

August (Friedrich Leopold) Weismann (Jan. 17, 1834 – Nov. 5, 1914) was a German biologist and one of the founders of the science of genetics. He is best known for his opposition to the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired traits and for his "germ plasm" theory, the forerunner of DNA theory.

Weismann conceived the idea, arising out of his early observations on the Hydrozoa, that the germ cells of animals contain "something essential for the species, something which must be carefully preserved and passed on from one generation to another."

Weismann envisioned the hereditary substances from the two parents become mixed together in the fertilized egg and a form of nuclear division in which each daughter nucleus receives only half the original ancestral germ plasms.

A new study demonstrates that Tyrannosaurus, Allosaurus and Erlikosaurus show distinct differences in the recruitment of the jaw adductor musculature and resulting gape, confirming previous dietary and ecological assumptions. While the carnivorous taxa T. rex and Allosaurus were capable of a wide gape and sustained muscle force, the herbivorous therizinosaurian Erlikosaurus was constrained to small gape angles.

Monday, November 02, 2015

Abstract: Most dromaeosaurids were small- to medium-sized cursorial, scansorial, and arboreal, sometimes volant predators, but a comparatively small percentage grew to gigantic proportions. Only two such giant “raptors” have been described from North America.

Here, we describe a new giant dromaeosaurid, Dakotaraptor steini gen. et sp. nov., from the Hell Creek Formation of South Dakota. The discovery represents the first giant dromaeosaur from the Hell Creek Formation, and the most recent in the fossil record worldwide. A row of prominent ulnar papilli or “quill knobs” on the ulna is our first clear evidence for feather quills on a large dromaeosaurid forearm and impacts evolutionary reconstructions and functional morphology of such derived, typically flight-related features.

The presence of this new predator expands our record of theropod diversity in latest Cretaceous Laramidia, and radically changes paleoecological reconstructions of the Hell Creek Formation.

Hay (May 22, 1846 – Nov. 2, 1930) was an American paleontologist whose catalogs of fossil vertebrates greatly organized existing knowledge and became standard references. Hay's primary scientific interest was the study of the Pleistocene vertebrata of North America and he is renowned for his work on skull and brain anatomy. His first major work was his Bibliography and Catalogue of the Fossil Vertebrata of North America (1902), supplemented by two more volumes (1929-30). Hay also wrote on the evidence of early humans in North America. link

The discovery of an Ornithomimus with preserved tail feathers and soft tissue is shedding light on the convergent evolution of these dinosaurs with ostriches relating to thermoregulation.

"We now know what the plumage looked like on the tail, and that from the mid-femur down, it had bare skin," says Aaron van der Reest. This is the first report of such preserved skin forming a web from the femoral shaft to the abdomen, never before seen in non-avian dinosaurs. "Ostriches use bare skin to thermoregulate.

Because the plumage on this specimen is virtually identical to that of an ostrich, we can infer that Ornithomimus was likely doing the same thing, using feathered regions on their body to maintain body temperature. It would've looked a lot like an ostrich." In fact, this group of animals—referred to as ornithomimids—is commonly referred to as "ostrich mimics." Read more at Phys Org.

Alfred Lothar Wegener (Nov. 1, 1880 – Nov, 1930) was a German meteorologist and geophysicist who first gave a well-developed hypothesis of continental drift. He suggested (1912) that about 250 million yrs ago all the present-day continents came from a single primitive land mass, the supercontinent Pangaea, which eventually broke up and gradually drifted apart. (A similar idea was proposed earlier by F.B. Taylor in 1910.) Others saw the fit of coastlines of South America and Africa, but Wegener added more geologic and paleontologic evidence that these two continents were once joined. From Today In Science History

de Beer (Nov. 1, 1899 – June 21, 1972) was an English zoologist and morphologist who contributed to experimental embryology, anatomy, and evolution. He refuted the germ-layer theory and developed the concept of paedomorphism - the retention of juvenile characteristics of ancestors in mature adults).

From examination of the fossil Archaeopteryx, De Beer proposed mosaic evolution with piecemeal evolutionary changes to explain the combination of bird and reptile features.